The Current Status and Future Perspectives of Virtual Maintenance

Virtual maintenance, which is widely used in aerospace, automobile, military equipment, etc., has been given abroad attention among equipment life-cycle including concept definition, system design, component production, daily operation, troubleshooting, and so on. Virtual maintenance has been given many different definitions and lot of technologies for implementation, but there is no clear systematic conclusion on the both. Based on the review of the current achievements, the elements of virtual maintenance are extracted, the technologies are systematically explored, and the applications are developed. Meanwhile, the future perspectives of virtual maintenance are discussed associated with virtual reality and augmented reality, multi-person collaboration, remote assistance, as well as artificial intelligence.